On 4/2/07, The Cunctator cunctator@gmail.com wrote:
On 4/2/07, charles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com charles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com wrote:
"The Cunctator" wrote
I soundly disagree with you that's the main conclusion from this
discussion.
I'm open to other conclusions.
In fact, looking at your above summary, I might think the proper conclusion to draw is that the bureaucratic overhead of contributing to Wikipedia has grown out of control.
It probably is harder to be a newbie. But you can still turn up and edit
99.9% of the articles without having an account. It is not plausible to me that there is a solution to compiling the largest repository (of its kind) of human knowledge ever, without some sort of trade-off. 'Open for business' is still hanging there on the door.
I think a powerful fallacy in your line of reasoning is the assumption that the encyclopedia in its current state is anywhere near the point of being comprehensive.
We should be expending every effort to prevent Wikipedia from being less welcoming or harder for newbies. Signs that Wikipedia is becoming less welcoming for newbies indicate the primary points of decay in the system.
You're right, Wikipedia certainly isn't comprehensive. However, this is only a temporary solution, and as soon as it's over, people can start adding more articles again (indeed, we'd probably even have a system for people to do this during the moratorium). This doesn't make it worse for newbies, because by closing new article creation now, we can finally clear the massive cleanup backlogs, and so we can start dealing with new articles right away, making Wikipedia more reliable, giving it a better reputation and therefore attracting more new users. In addition, perhaps if we didn't have to focus on fixing year-old problems, we could open up article creation to everyone, including anons, making us even more welcoming to new users than before, but still not compromising our integrity, because we'd have the manpower to actually fix any new articles with problems.